Introduction

This chapter is designed to get you up and running with D3.js, covering fundamental aspects, such as what D3.js is, and how to set up a typical D3.js data visualization environment. One particular section is also devoted in covering some lesser known areas of JavaScript that D3.js relies heavily on.

What is D3? D3 refers to Data-Driven Documents, and according to the official D3 Wiki:

In a sense, D3 is a specialized JavaScript library that allows you to create amazing data visualizations using a simpler (data driven) approach by leveraging existing web standards. D3.js was created by Mike Bostock (http://bost.ocks.org/mike/) and superseded his previous work on a different JavaScript data visualization library called Protovis. For more information on how D3 was created and on the theory that influenced both Protovis and D3.js, please check out links in the following information box. Here in this book we will focus more on how to use D3.js to power your visualization. Initially, some aspects of D3 may be a bit confusing due to its different approach to data visualization using JavaScript. I hope that over the course of this book, a large number of topics, both basic and advanced, will make you comfortable and effective with D3. Once properly understood, D3 can improve your productivity and expressiveness with data visualizations by orders of magnitude.